Apologies, my first reply only went to Jessica, apparently. On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 02:50:46PM -0700, Jessica Tomechak wrote: > Hello all, > We had earlier proposed using the cc-by-sa license for documentation, for a > variety of good reasons, and I believed this was approved by our mentors > and/or > legal. Recently, Joe B. did some work in the doc files and has inserted the > Apache 2.0 license. It also looks like we have changed it in the > publican-cloudstack brand files (see Legal_Notice.xml).
The CC-BY-SA discussion must have happened before I started doing work with CloudStack, and my understanding is that we wanted to license everything as Apache. That's how the initial contribution (David's Runbook) was also licensed. > Is there any reason why we can not use cc-by-sa legally? It will allow us to > do > good stuff like pull in content from outside contributors, blogs, Wikipedia, > any cc-licensed content we can find. If we need to take the docs into their > own > non-Apache repo to do this, it's worth considering. Here's what Apache's resolved questions page has to say about CC-BY-SA[1]: "Unmodified media under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 and Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licenses may be included in Apache products, subject to the licenses attribution clauses which may require LICENSE/NOTICE/README changes. For any other type of CC-SA licensed work, please contact the Legal PMC." So - it looks like CC-BY-SA is OK, but the inclusion of "unmodified media" concerns me a bit. Specifically - does that mean we can only drop in whole works that are CC-licensed? If so, the value of the work is small if we can't edit it and such to include within our guides. It also might cause problems if we ever want to re-use our docs as inline documentation within the UI. Might be nice at some point, for instance, to have context help available directly in the UI. Given that we have contributors like Wido who are also code contributors, a non-Apache repo is not recommended. I won't say it would double the effort required to contribute, but it certainly would increase the amount of effort required. Did you have specific content in mind that we should pull in? I think if folks are blogging or producing docs as CC-BY-SA they'd be open to re-licensing under Apache if we ask nicely. Not sure Wikipedia content is worth having a different license for docs on its own... [1]http://www.apache.org/legal/resolved.html#cc-sa -- Joe Brockmeier http://dissociatedpress.net/ Twitter: @jzb
